Name Nora Chadwick Role Medievalist | Died April 24, 1972, Cambridge | |
People also search for Myles Dillon, Hector Munro Chadwick, Viktor Zhirmunsky Books The Celtic Realms, The Growth of Literature, The Druids, Oral epics of Central Asia, The Celts | ||
Education University of Cambridge | ||
Nora Kershaw Chadwick CBE FSA FBA (28 January 1891 – 24 April 1972) was an English medievalist.
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Early life and education
Nora Kershaw was born in Lancashire in 1891, the first daughter of James Kershaw and Emma Clara Booth, married in 1888. Her sister Mabel was born in 1895.
She received her undergraduate degree from Newnham College at the University of Cambridge (where she was later an Honorary Life Fellow) and lectured at St Andrews during World War I. She returned to Cambridge in 1919 to study Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse under Professor Hector Munro Chadwick. They were married in 1922.
The Chadwicks turned their home into a literary salon, a tradition which Mrs. Chadwick maintained after the death of her husband in 1947.
Career
Most of her life was spent on research, in her later years primarily on the Celts. She was University Lecturer in the Early History and Culture of the British Isles at the University of Cambridge from 1950 to 1958. She received honorary degrees from the University of Wales, the National University of Ireland and the University of St Andrews, and was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1961.
The Chadwicks took an interdisciplinary approach and wrote on many topics; they demonstrated influentially the study of multiple "early cultures of north-west Europe" and brought comparative evidence to bear on heroic literature. Nora Chadwick is best known for her work on the Celts, particularly on the earliest period.
Bequest
Nora Chadwick died in Cambridge; she left a sum to the University of Cambridge to endow a readership in Celtic Studies.
Publications
With her husband, she published The Growth of Literature in 1932–40.
I: The Ancient Literatures of Europe (1932) II: Russian Oral Literature, Yugoslav Oral Poetry, Early Indian Literature, Early Hebrew Literature (1936) III: The Oral Literature of the Tatars and Polynesia, etc. (1940)She also wrote The Beginnings of Russian History, an enquiry into sources (1946).
Chadwick collaborated with V. M. Zhirmunsky on a revision of the part of volume III that deals with epic poetry in Central Asian languages. The revised text was published separately in 1969 as Oral Epics of Central Asia.
In 1955 she published Poetry and Letters in early Christian Gaul.
Chadwick wrote about Celtic Britain and Breton history, and collaborated with Myles Dillon and Kenneth H. Jackson.
On Anglo-Saxon language and literature:
A list of the publications of Hector and Nora Chadwick was printed for her 80th birthday in 1971.